Extensible markup language (XML) has become an industry standard for data exchange between computer systems. XML has also proven to be particularly advantageous for representing a large communications network by describing the elements thereof as well as the relationships between those elements.
Information encoded in XML format always has a tree structure. In particular, for trees represented in XML format, each node of the tree has a) at least a name and it may also have b) at most one value and c) one or more children. Nodes of trees structures without children are known in the art as leaf nodes.
Although XML is text based, due to its formal notation, it is difficult for a human being reading it to comprehend the information represented using XML. This is especially problematic for large XML documents, such as those used to describe a communications network. It has been generally recognized in the art that it would be advantageous for human beings to be readily able to understand the information contained within tree structures such as those represented by XML. To this end, various tools have been developed to convert XML to more human comprehensible formats. However, generally, these tools require customization based on the particular application and/or the nature of the data contained within the XML representation, or they may require a special application to view the human comprehensible format.